Chapter Six
FENN
Sitting high on her sapphire throne, the girl—Hana—looks utterly lost. She looks older now, and her face contorts with fleeting emotions. Confusion. Sadness. But there’s one overriding emotion that, lately, I’ve recognized in myself: fear.
“Portia and Fenn,” Doran says, “I’ve another meeting. Finish the inquiry and file a report. We’ll discuss later.”
Without so much as a goodbye, Doran disappears from Portia’s visor.
“You have to tell us what you know,” Portia says, her voice slightly whistling and unemotional. “We don’t have communication with the parting ships.”
“You can’t speak to Cyclo’s crew?” she asks. She squeezes the armrests of her blue throne, and it starts to shrink under her. She lands a toe and then her whole foot on the floor. She stands there, hands at her sides, looking helpless as the blob of blue chair sinks back into the floor.
“No, we can’t.”
“How much time does Cyclo have left to live?” she asks.
Portia answers, “We can estimate how long the ship has to live, though our estimates can be quite off. But the Calathus has no more than a few weeks before it’s completely uninhabitable. That was when we landed. We’ve already been here thirty-six hours.”
At this, my heart starts to pound. Why doesn’t it ever get any easier to hear the truth? To know my own mortal timeline? Instinctively, my hand goes to the metal pendant hanging from my neck. I still haven’t watched the hologram message from Callandra. I’m still not ready.
“Our directive is very clear,” I say. “This is a data-gathering mission, with huge amounts we need to collect every day, or else…” I don’t want to get into our contracts, and the death benefit, and the fact that if I don’t fulfill it, Callandra may not be able to afford her own life.
“I need to speak to my mother,” she says.
“I don’t think that’s possible.” Portia gives me a warning glance.
“If you don’t think, then it’s possible,” she says.
Her words hang in the air as we try to make sense of them.
Portia sighs. “You ought to eat something. Fenn, bring her to the mess hall when she’s ready. She looks malnourished for a human.”
“I need to speak to my mother. I need to speak to Dr. Um,” Hana says again.
My face gets hot. I don’t have time for this. And that makes me angry because I would like to help her. I actually would. God, what’s happened to me? I haven’t time to care about anything but the mission. Even without the watch that’s strapped to my wrist, I’m keenly aware of seconds ticking by, of hours I’m losing that I’ll never ever get back. A smarter, more spiritual person would find some solace and profound meaning in each moment from here to the end of my life. Me, all I feel is the desperation of frantically trying to fulfill my contract. Which, by the way, I’ve barely started because of her. Since she was tranquilized, all I’ve done is unpack the supplies into our makeshift headquarters on the ship’s bridge, place a dozen data scanners around the ship for data gathering, and babysit. By now, when I pop open my holofeed, it shows I’m barely over 5 percent done. According to my requirements, I should have done at least half a dozen drone tests already. And I haven’t. Three weeks, they thought we’d have. But already, we need more like six, and we don’t have six weeks.
I’m no babysitter. If there’s no protocol for this, well hell, there’s no protocol. I think of Callandra. She’s the only person that matters.
When we were little, I was the one who caught her after she fell climbing a boulder near our home. I’d fetch her from the bioluminescent caves that are everywhere on Ipineq, before the sun set and the cave scorpions got too hungry. And with every stint away from home, she’d only asked me for a small thing—a souvenir from my “travels,” be it detention or military schools or a drone-thievery run. So I’d bring back tiny geodes from planet Ursulina, or a crystal that littered the ground around the juvenile detention on Ipineq’s moon. It was the least I could do.
I think of her struggling to walk again, and anger boils inside. Her accident is my fault. Her life depends on me and this mission. There’s no room for anyone else.
“I can’t help you,” I say. “I’m going to get my dinner.”
I exit the room, but the web aperture doesn’t close behind me. I don’t know my way around the ship very well, except that it’s circular. I blink twice, and the minuscule holofeed chip on my forehead turns on my holo dashboard, laid atop reality before my face. Gammand had it updated with my tasks, convo channels, and Cyclo’s map. It’s now live with the information streaming from the data scanners all over the ship.
If I keep going in one direction, eventually I’ll find the mess hall. Walking on the slightly squishy floor is taking me some time to get used to. The gravity here is not quite equal to Ipineq, my home planet. I come from a short-statured family, and the gravity was 1.2 times that of Earth’s, which meant growing up in detention on lesser g-force planets, I ended up being the tallest person ever in the Actias family.
Every ten feet or so, an irregular window on the right shows up. Long and narrow at times, wide at others, they are embedded with a clear plastrix so I can see out to space—vast, black, glittering with stars and the Merope nebula nearby. It’s beautiful. My parents would tell me, while I was away, how much my sister loved space. So much that she wants to spend her entire life flitting from one place to another. She had pilot’s genes in her, just like our parents. I suppose I got them, too, though I pilot drones, not ships. My parents would tell me she was acing her tests in the junior academy. She’s the smart one.
I’m the screw-up. It had started when I was ten. I’d stolen my first nano drone and had flown it into the left ear of my astrophysics teacher. I thought it was funny; it wasn’t so funny when she lost hearing in that ear from the high-resonance damage I’d caused. That was when I was kicked out of Nystrade Academy, a free school, which meant my family had to pay to educate me, and that meant less money for Callandra.
Somewhere around the fifth school and third stint in juvenile detention on various planets, my parents were drained of resources. Callandra had a future thanks to scholarships, but scholarships don’t take you to the most elite academies. I’d basically throttled all her hopes of being the brightest and the best. But I just couldn’t say no when a new scheme popped up, each seemingly more lucrative and more of a sure thing than the last. Stealing was too alluring. And I was good at it. In school, I failed. In thievery, I was an incandescent, if intermittent, success, flickering farther and farther away from Callandra.
When Callandra was fifteen, my parents had found a great mining job for me on Ipineq, one that would ignore my police record and give me a chance. I could earn money for the family, legitimate money. I was all set to fly back for this job, loathing the idea, when I remembered my promise to Callandra to bring her back something from my travels. So I took one quick side job—stealing silver-gold electrum alloy pellets from a passing ship. One of those pellets would make a great little gift for her, and the money might help pay for her next year of school. And then our getaway ship was caught.
I didn’t show up on the first day.
So Callandra did, lying about her age and promising my parents she’d study at night to finish her schooling. She was two weeks in when her mining drover fell into a magnesium crevasse.
When I heard, I was already back in prison. And all I could think of was her when she was eight years old, the first time I’d been sent away to detention. This helpless look. Her huge brown eyes said it all.
What have you done?
Why do you keep leaving? Why can’t you help me?
Vaguely, it reminds me of the girl, just as I’d left her in that room by herself. I can’t help you, I’d said. Pretty typical Fenn words. I can’t help being who I am. And I’m still so angry for being me.
I stop walking and see the dazzling stars pass lazily across the windows, though I’m the one who’s really spinning. Perspective is a bitch.
I sigh and turn around. It only takes me a few minutes to reach the room where I’d left her. She’s still sitting there on that hard bench, looking at her feet. Well, her feet encased in blue matrix. The ship looks like it’s eating her feet.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
Her head whips up. “You came back.”
I smirk. “It’s not like I can leave the ship.”
“I can’t, either.” Her face is strained with pain.
“Let me get you unstuck. You need to eat something.”
“I’m not stuck,” she says. “It’s okay, Cyclo. I’ll be all right.”
The blue material slowly slithers away from her calves and ankles, until it evens out as the floor beneath her, nearly solid.
“What was it doing?”
“Comforting me,” she says.
I raise my left eyebrow. “By eating you?”
“Cyclo was infusing me with some dopamine. She knew I was sad. I needed a boost.”
“So she dopes you up with neurotransmitters through your toes whenever you’re off? You must be pretty fragile.”
Something about how my words bite makes her frown. “I’m fine.” She stands, still wearing that robe of hers. She needs some real clothes. “Where is the rest of the crew?”
“You probably know better than I do. They’re in the south mess hall. But first, you should get dressed.”
She looks down at her robe, which is stained a little from me tackling her, being the dirty space rat that I am. “All right.”
She walks out the door and heads down the opposite hall. As I follow her, I notice how weirdly she walks. Her stride is short, like something is tethering her knees together. It’s stiff, too. I can see the boniness of her shoulders through the thin fabric of her robe. After about five minutes, she stops walking. I’m about to ask her why we’ve stopped, when I realize she’s panting.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
She leans against the wall, eyes closed. “I’m not…used to this much…walking,” she says between deep breaths. “I need Cyclo. I need to sleep again.”
“You need a steak and more exercise,” I mutter.
She gives me a nasty look and pushes her white forelock back. Her voice is deeper now than before, calmer. “You’re rude.”
I smile. I have no idea why, but her comment is so on point, it’s funny. I am rude.
“Stop laughing at me,” she adds.
I put my hands up. “Who’s laughing?”
She keeps walking. We pass by the docking bays, the northwest mess halls, and a bunch of empty laboratories. Soon, she takes a right turn into a windowless corridor that’s pretty bare—a few doors, and fewer of the technical rooms I’d seen in the other quadrant.
“Where are we?”
“Northeast quadrant alpha,” she gasps. “Here. My room.” She touches the membrane door, and it shrinks away rapidly. I don’t go in.
Already, I can see the ship’s matrix snaking up over her ankles, and the girl is getting a fuzzy look in her eyes. “Hey. Tell it to stop that.”
“But she’ll help me breathe,” she says.
“There’s plenty of oxygen in the ship’s air.” I point to the readouts whizzing by on my holofeed. “We’re at twenty-one percent oxygen here. Totally normal for a human. What is it with you and this ship?”
She shrugs. “All of the crew did this. We rely on Cyclo for our recalibration.”
“Look. I’m really hungry.” I want to say “I don’t have time for this,” but I’m starting to sound like a broken audio clip, so I keep my lips shut.
Hana looks at her feet, and the goo recedes again. The door membrane starts to constrict closed, and I wait. Vaguely, from behind the thin membrane, I can see her shedding the robe, her pale-skinned body walking here and there, bending and putting on clothing. It’s fuzzy enough that I can’t see details but clear enough to see that she’s got curves on a straight figure, like one of those zero-g aerialists. My face flushes.
“Oh, shut up and shut it down,” I tell my body.
The last thing I need on this trip is a distraction. And it looks like the distraction is, unfortunately, very pretty and very weird, in a way that makes me want to spend more time with her. Except that the time left I have to live is already slipping swiftly away.
Just my luck.